[Kaelaris]

Heya guys, im kinda new to this forum and im in need of some advice, me and my mates (like franakapan) are setting up a website and which is mainly about reviewing games, previews etc. bascially I just wanted to know any effective online marketing techniques anyone could give me that are relatively cheap? thanks in advance

[deemo]

submit to article directorys and web directorys, take part in link exchange, start a blog, send an email to all your contacts and make them send it to all their contacts, take part in an established game forum and put your site in your sig

[akula]

what's your budget?

don't say "small"

numbers numbers numbers

[akula]

Originally Posted by deemo

submit to article directorys and web directorys, take part in link exchange, start a blog

dude. if you were asking for advice, would you want some guy named deemo telling you things without even establishing important facts relevant to your situation

this thing about reaping and sawing comes to mind :-)

[Kaelaris]

lol well, hmm lets see, i havnt finalised a budget yet, but i have a privet funder who likes the idea of the website whos willing to do some funding, so, hmm, lets say £200 for the minute.

[NeeJam]

basically you need to get your site in web directorys and places where you can get traffic to your site

[deemo]

your right akula and i understand where your coming from but their just basic methods to increse search engine ranking which will lead to more traffic

whats wrong with deemo

[akula]

ok. semantics: you asked for advertising options. everyone's giving you promotional ideas. promotions and ads are different things. because you're not sanctioning them, I take it your question is: how can I best promote my venture on a limited budget, which includes advertising options.

ok, complicated answer:

best way to promote depends on what results you want:

Revenue costs money. As a rule of thumb, 30% is what you pay to get 100% in revenues. (i.e 30c spent to earn $1).

If your target is 1,000,000 in revenue, you need to allocate 300k to promotional spending. With $200, you're planning to buy about $660 in revenue. If you want more, you need bigger budget.

Lower cost of revenue:

Time spent is the same is money spent. But because it doesn't impact cash flow, you spend it first.

All of the activities listed previous, are still more expensive than free, because its your time which is spent doing the promotional activities. To lower this cost to zero, you need to engage other people in involuntarily promoting your business for you. This means; buzz, viral and word of mouth marketing. These three approaches have multiple examples.

Low cost / Best result advertising:

When buying advertising, you focus on metrics like conversion rates to arrive at the lowest cost per customer figure. The method with lowest cost per customer figure is search marketing. You can use snapp.com to only pay per conversion.

to sum up:

1) buzz, viral, word of mouth. very different three things. have the lowest cost because carried out by an unpaid work force.

do you want a list?

2) all sort of tactics where you spend time (not money) to get exposure. just means exposure, not lowest per customer cost

do you want a list?

3) paid advertising. use metrics like CLV (customer lifetime value) and CPM (cost per 1000 page views) to find lowest CPC (cost per customer).

Do you want a list?

[akula]

Originally Posted by deemo

your right akula and i understand where your coming from but their just basic methods to increse search engine ranking which will lead to more traffic

whats wrong with deemo

nothing, your name's fine. we're in the same virtual house, and I expect the same level of professionalism from my housemates that you're welcome to hold me to.

if I gave you the same answer as you gave that guy, you would have skipped my post, and that's not good for anybody. right?

[NeeJam]

Originally Posted by nik_b02

basically you need to get your site in web directorys and places where you can get traffic to your site

Sorry about the shocking post which putting it bluntly would'nt help you at all.

Firstly you are running a site which does previews, reviews etc. So you need to find all websites which offer these services and offer link exchanges. This can be time-consuming but you are basically going to have to search through Google and Yahoo for the services your offering and do link exchanges - some people will want a straight link exchnage or a 3 way link exchange. A 3 way link exchange is basically the website you want to link to you does but you link to another website that they as you to.

Secondly, you need ot find web directories, most directories will require recoripcol links(think i spelt recoripcol wrong) which means basically one to confirm the site is yours and two to build up their backlinks as well. To get hold of a few web directories go to www.namepros.com - there you can go to the link exchange area and find link exchanges and find some web directories to build up your backlinks to get traffic to your website.

Thirdly you need to do what i like to call FREE ADVERTISING - you need to submit your site onto www.domdo.com and places like that - domdo will put your website on automatically it will give you a few hits not loads but some, i only found out about it yesterday.

Fourthly, you need to get your site out their is how i like to call it, basically waht you need to do is tell everyone you know about your site and get them to signup, or get some of them to signup, even if they don't ask them to tell their associates and tell them to pass it on, this will get you some nice traffic coming to your site.

Finally you need to do paid advertising, use adsense and overture for this. You can set your limit say $5 a day and get yourself of say a pr5 or 6 site to get yourself pageranked quickly , the easiest way to do this is go on a website that is basically doing the same as you that does overture or adsense and click advertise here your advert should appear on the site and will get you found quicker by the googlebot. Also you need to advertise on places liek my website www.buymydesktop.com - i don't mean to self promote here, but i am getting nice traffic and a good click through rate on the people who have already purchased icons on my desktop.

Hope this will help you
nik_b02

[Kaelaris]

Thanks everyone who replied! cheers for the advice im gonna get to the stuff you've mentioned right away!!! as soon as i wake up tomorrow becuase im going to sleep now